Westinghouse has stated that the Quad HDTVs, like the 52" on display, "does not really target the consumer market, but high-end industrial applications."
They make statements like this in order to position themselves at the high end of the consumer market. After all, the overmonied folks in the high end of the consumer market invariably fancy themselves "above the consumer market".
I've never understood this part of quantum mechanics. The papers in your example didn't magically change color because they weren't being observed. One was always black and one was always white.
They didn't change color... because they didn't have a color at all.
This is indeed the weird thing about our universe: things aren't specific until they need to be, when somebody is observing them. When nobody is looking, they revert to approximations.
It's a compelling clue that we are actually living inside a simulation. Approximations are the universe's way of conserving CPU power.
Isn't there something to do with the spin of an electron, which when you reverse the spin, immediately reverses the spin of some other electron, with no delay? Couldn't you reverse the spin of a bunch of electrons on earth, and have their counterparts match the reversal, 30 light years away. It could be used for exchanging information at faster than light speeds.
You are thinking of quantum entanglement, aka "spooky action at a distance".
It cannot be used to transmit information. Think of it this way:
You take two slips of paper, one black and one white, and put them in envelopes.
You randomly select an envelope and mail it to your brother in Poughkeepsie. You keep the other envelope for yourself.
While the envelopes are in transit, nobody has yet observed their contents (i.e. their spins). Yet you know that their contents (their spins) must be opposite because they are an entangled pair.
The envelope travels to Poughkeepsie at the speed of light, or significantly slower in the case of the US Postal Service.
Your brother receives and opens his envelope. He observes that his slip of paper is black. The uncertainty collapses: he now instantly knows that your slip of paper is white.
Notice that you cannot send actual information by this route. The uncertainty of "which slip of paper is in my envelope?" collapses instantaneously, but it collapses into a random choice. Neither of you could know in advance which color you would find in your envelope.
This illustration changes slightly when executed at the quantum level: while the envelopes were in transit, both slips of paper were actually grey... though some might insist that they were both all possible colors, until they were finally observed.
Mike Dunn, president of worldwide home entertainment for 20th Century Fox, said: "I really believe the format war is in its final phase."'"
The word 'really' is a subconscious codeword, meaning 'not really'. Likewise the word 'great'.
It's similar to what's going on when someone uses your first name in a sentence when speaking to you, such as "This amplifier will give you much better performance, Dave."
So yeah, thanks to Mike Dunn for telegraphing his conviction that the format war is indeed still raging.
I disagree that investigators must have ID to start with for an investigation. Let them start with nothing other than the facts of the crime. The core of the matter is that we're allowing our government to assume we are criminals, which is evil and the basis of a police state. By default, the government does NOT need to know who I am or what I am doing.
Watch that package deal there, pardner. While the government does not need to know what you are doing, it does (by default) need to know who you are. How can it perform any essential government function (police+courts+military) without at least being able to identify its citizens?
Uh ? There seems to be a non-sequitur here. Living organisms consume free energy, they do not create it (in a strict, global sense, nothing can). It is possible that they create reactive, non-equilibrium chemicals, in the process of harnessing another source of energy: plants, for example, create oxygen from CO2 by harnessing sunlight, and use the carbon as food and construction material. But there doesn't seem to be any logical necessity.
There seems to be no logical impossibility agaist lifeforms which would extract energy from the sunlight in such a way that no active, non-equilibrium gas is produced or released in the atmosphere.
Life doesn't consume energy, even "free energy" (whatever the hell that means).
Life consumes order, and produces entropy as exhaust.
As warning labels and tort law evolve together, they gradually converge on a single unified warning label:
Do not use indoors. Do not use outdoors. Do not use this product for any purpose. Do not buy this product. Do not read this label.
On a more serious note, the current silliness over warning labels is a side-effect of the recent switch from buyer-beware to seller-beware. As a result, it becomes less and less profitable to produce anything, and more and more profitable to be dangerously stupid.
"Recognizing the concerns expressed by electronic privacy advocates and community members, the City has negotiated an Agreement that addresses the privacy needs of our residents, negotiating terms stronger than any other City and incorporating protections that go far beyond what federal, state or local law requires. EarthLink and the provider of the free service will be required to fully disclose their privacy policy.
Earthlink guarantees your privacy by tossing 95% of your emails. Nobody will be able to reconstruct your conversations.
And your security is insured by having 30% of your packets dropped. This has been scientifically proven to reduce probing attacks by 30%.
I can't see how this process would *not* discriminate for bias with race, social status, or gender. Just as insurance companies are allowed to discriminate for those things when setting policy premiums, this process may force society to accept discrimination in the workplace by showing that the factors *do* have legitimate consequences.
How is that not a Good Thing?
At the very least, if we all learned the real socioeconomic cost of forcing the hire of suboptimal employees, it would completely change the debate over such laws. I say this because anyone will sign on to a law whose advocates sound good while blustering with an air of moral superiority... but it's another thing entirely to see exactly what a law does to final product prices on a store shelf.
Oh, well as long as the fucking imaginary "free market" triumphs over legality and morality that's all right then.
Nice package deal there.:P Obviously it's a triumph over legality, but since when is it immoral for employers to select what they regard as optimal employees?
Do you equate morality with legality?
Do you equate morality with transfer payments, such as (in this case) forcing employers to hire less-than-optimal employees?
Do you select optimal friends for yourself? How is that different?
Nigeria has filed its request for OLPC laptops. A cursory review of Nigeria's application has uncovered an astonishing correllation: by sheer coincidence, Nigeria appears to have the exact same number of children (28,913,720) as the number of adults eligible for service in its military.
Nigerian president Obasanjo was contacted for comment, but was reportedly away at a military planning session. A spokesman for his office later asked when the OLPC laptops would begin arriving.
It will be interesting to see if any company using this technique ever get accused of racial,sexual etc bias.
What if google's statistical data (drawn from its database of performance reviews) shows that some ages, genders, races, and cultures are objectively better at a particular job than others?
Google's test will obviously avoid asking any direct questions about age, gender, and race, because that's illegal (even when objectively justifiable). However, if the test is powered by a statistics engine drawing a database of past performance reviews, then the test could unintentionally evolve to ask about such things indirectly.
An example: perhaps cat-ownership is correllated with femaleness, and femaleness is correllated with superior performance in writing technical documentation. An automated test-generator would unwittingly evolve to ask applicants about cat-ownership, in order to unwittingly select superior female candidates.
It's an amusing possibility. Indeed, it would be the free-market's way of legitimately selecting candidates based on age/gender/race while remaining underneath the legal radar.
I suppose also that programming "want" is an impossibility, "want" being a characteristic of sentience. Rather than programming a robot that it wants A over B, thus merely mimicking want, present it with A and B and program it to simply choose.
You've redefined 'want' into 'choose' because you don't understand either one. You see the same hand-waving going on in the silly debate over "Is homosexuality a choice?".
To put this point another way: How do you program it to choose without also programming it to have wants?
But take solace: nobody else understands the matter either. And I doubt anybody really wants to understand it, because that would almost certainly involve some major reductions in our sense of free will. We'd have to admit that we are incentive-driven and hence not the free-wheeling whimsical sovereigns that we think we are.
When computer neural nets finally do achieve the sophistication of a human brain, they'll begin wanting and choosing (as we do), without being able to explain their own algorithms (as we also cannot). Perhaps then we'll be able to study them from the outside in order to at last understand the physical process of choice.
Bruce Schneier said it best. He compared the Tianenmen Square incident with the various uprisings in Russia. In China, the government ordered the soldiers to fire on the civilians, and they did. In Russia, they didn't. Although Russia certainly has its problems, this seems to me to be a vital difference.
In the leaders' minds, it makes all the difference in the world whether or not your order to kill citizens will be obeyed.
Or, a history lesson: empires rise and empires fall. Be nice to people on the way up, and they might be nice to your children as your country declines in importance.
They might be. But they won't.
Karma is a very satisfying idea... and indeed every religion embraces it to some degree, because we like to hear about it. But you and I both know it isn't true. That's why we have to go so such lengths to construct artificial karma systems, such as money, laws, slashdot . . .
After reading the website, I went to wikipedia and checked the relevant entry. The 'rational arguments' section contains a decent condensed version of that website. Meanwhile, I fleshed out the section on 'empirical arguments', perhaps it will amuse you.
Hot air, on the other hand, could be produced easily through future portable renewable sources (batteries, solar cells, etc).While a hot air craft may not be viable now, that doesn't mean it won't become viable in the next decade or two.
Yes, and hot air is amazingly easy to produce in commercial quantities. For example, you could post an article titled "Ask Slashdot: Should I upgrade my Sony laptop to Windows Vista?". Or just set up a wide collector over any major city during the first week of November during an election year.
I've always been curious why more people don't use gas. Is it not readily available across the nation? I've lived in the SE and deep south mostly....and have pretty much refused to even rent from the few places that didn't have gas, tho, I rarely rent in apt. complexes...mostly I rent houses or lived in a part of a house built as a double (common in NOLA).
Bingo. In a typical apartment complex with 16 units per building, all fire risks are multiplied 16x, because a single tenant can burn down all 16 tenants' apartments. So anything that significantly lowers the fire risk gives a bigger payoff.
Right... We are going to use up our supply of the most abundant element in the universe. Do you know what water (H2O) is made of?
Actually the problem with fusion power is that the containment vessel gets irradiated. Hard radiation causes practically any material to degrade, weaken, or otherwise become brittle. That means the containment vessel must be periodically replaced. Used containment vessels are radioactive waste that is roughly comparable to the wastes produced by fission.
You win. You are officially the biggest geek here -- and that's saying something!
You see the address ranges a lot when you're poking around in a crashed process with windebug. It's incredibly useful to know approximately where an instruction pointer is pointing.
I wonder if Bill even considers WGA to be DRM in his mind. After all, you can copy a Windows XP install disk (I imagine it is the same for Vista) all you want, so the Windows disk is not, in his mind, copy protected. WGA and activation are required to use Windows, but it is not required to install it. In most people's minds, this is DRM, but I could see where Bill Gates might really believe that this is not the case when it comes to Microsoft products since there is no "copy protection" on the actual media.
Interesting. And maybe that's the right way to look at it. People who are smarter than I am, are working on an improved copyright ideology in which it is the experience, rather than the data, that is protected.
In this new ideology, everyone can freely transfer any files to anyone else; information wants to be free, after all. So share your movies with everyone... in the long run, that's what the studios want anyway. You only have to purchase a ticket when it comes time to actually experience the show.
There would presumably be some kind of trusted players which would bill you two cents each time you played a song. Yes, I know that that's an infuriating idea, but what's the alternative? Charging you to own the bytes (as we do today) is equally troublesome, and worse, does not accurately charge you for the actual amount of pleasure you get.
In Bill Gates' mind, then, everyone can download the Windows install disks. WGA comes along later to impose a fee (or whatever) only on the 'experience' of running Windows.
In my mind, I'd rather pay twenty-five cents for each Word document I edit, than to pay $400 for an installation of the software that I might only use twenty-five times. What I really need is pricing granularity, which today's "purchase the file" schemes fail to accomplish. Same for songs, movies, anything. WGA is objectionable and flawed, but at least it is a more granular purchase scheme than charging per distribution disc.
Slashdot Mirror
They make statements like this in order to position themselves at the high end of the consumer market. After all, the overmonied folks in the high end of the consumer market invariably fancy themselves "above the consumer market".
While it is pedantically true that he possesses information about something, it is not information that was transmitted by the sender.
They didn't change color... because they didn't have a color at all.
This is indeed the weird thing about our universe: things aren't specific until they need to be, when somebody is observing them. When nobody is looking, they revert to approximations.
It's a compelling clue that we are actually living inside a simulation. Approximations are the universe's way of conserving CPU power.
You are thinking of quantum entanglement, aka "spooky action at a distance".
It cannot be used to transmit information. Think of it this way:
Notice that you cannot send actual information by this route. The uncertainty of "which slip of paper is in my envelope?" collapses instantaneously, but it collapses into a random choice. Neither of you could know in advance which color you would find in your envelope.
This illustration changes slightly when executed at the quantum level: while the envelopes were in transit, both slips of paper were actually grey... though some might insist that they were both all possible colors, until they were finally observed.
And I, for one, welcome our new nearby, low-frequency-emitting overlords.
And I would like to remind them that as a net.geek, I could be useful in rounding up others, to toil in their oneline goldfarms.
The word 'really' is a subconscious codeword, meaning 'not really'. Likewise the word 'great'.
It's similar to what's going on when someone uses your first name in a sentence when speaking to you, such as "This amplifier will give you much better performance, Dave."
So yeah, thanks to Mike Dunn for telegraphing his conviction that the format war is indeed still raging.
Watch that package deal there, pardner. While the government does not need to know what you are doing, it does (by default) need to know who you are. How can it perform any essential government function (police+courts+military) without at least being able to identify its citizens?
Life doesn't consume energy, even "free energy" (whatever the hell that means).
Life consumes order, and produces entropy as exhaust.
As warning labels and tort law evolve together, they gradually converge on a single unified warning label:
Do not use indoors. Do not use outdoors. Do not use this product for any purpose. Do not buy this product. Do not read this label.
On a more serious note, the current silliness over warning labels is a side-effect of the recent switch from buyer-beware to seller-beware. As a result, it becomes less and less profitable to produce anything, and more and more profitable to be dangerously stupid.
Earthlink guarantees your privacy by tossing 95% of your emails. Nobody will be able to reconstruct your conversations.
And your security is insured by having 30% of your packets dropped. This has been scientifically proven to reduce probing attacks by 30%.
How is that not a Good Thing?
At the very least, if we all learned the real socioeconomic cost of forcing the hire of suboptimal employees, it would completely change the debate over such laws. I say this because anyone will sign on to a law whose advocates sound good while blustering with an air of moral superiority... but it's another thing entirely to see exactly what a law does to final product prices on a store shelf.
Nice package deal there. :P Obviously it's a triumph over legality, but since when is it immoral for employers to select what they regard as optimal employees?
Do you equate morality with legality?
Do you equate morality with transfer payments, such as (in this case) forcing employers to hire less-than-optimal employees?
Do you select optimal friends for yourself? How is that different?
Nigeria has filed its request for OLPC laptops. A cursory review of Nigeria's application has uncovered an astonishing correllation: by sheer coincidence, Nigeria appears to have the exact same number of children (28,913,720) as the number of adults eligible for service in its military.
Nigerian president Obasanjo was contacted for comment, but was reportedly away at a military planning session. A spokesman for his office later asked when the OLPC laptops would begin arriving.
What if google's statistical data (drawn from its database of performance reviews) shows that some ages, genders, races, and cultures are objectively better at a particular job than others?
Google's test will obviously avoid asking any direct questions about age, gender, and race, because that's illegal (even when objectively justifiable). However, if the test is powered by a statistics engine drawing a database of past performance reviews, then the test could unintentionally evolve to ask about such things indirectly.
An example: perhaps cat-ownership is correllated with femaleness, and femaleness is correllated with superior performance in writing technical documentation. An automated test-generator would unwittingly evolve to ask applicants about cat-ownership, in order to unwittingly select superior female candidates.
It's an amusing possibility. Indeed, it would be the free-market's way of legitimately selecting candidates based on age/gender/race while remaining underneath the legal radar.
You've redefined 'want' into 'choose' because you don't understand either one. You see the same hand-waving going on in the silly debate over "Is homosexuality a choice?".
To put this point another way: How do you program it to choose without also programming it to have wants?
But take solace: nobody else understands the matter either. And I doubt anybody really wants to understand it, because that would almost certainly involve some major reductions in our sense of free will. We'd have to admit that we are incentive-driven and hence not the free-wheeling whimsical sovereigns that we think we are.
When computer neural nets finally do achieve the sophistication of a human brain, they'll begin wanting and choosing (as we do), without being able to explain their own algorithms (as we also cannot). Perhaps then we'll be able to study them from the outside in order to at last understand the physical process of choice.
Bruce Schneier said it best. He compared the Tianenmen Square incident with the various uprisings in Russia. In China, the government ordered the soldiers to fire on the civilians, and they did. In Russia, they didn't. Although Russia certainly has its problems, this seems to me to be a vital difference.
In the leaders' minds, it makes all the difference in the world whether or not your order to kill citizens will be obeyed.
They might be. But they won't.
Karma is a very satisfying idea... and indeed every religion embraces it to some degree, because we like to hear about it. But you and I both know it isn't true. That's why we have to go so such lengths to construct artificial karma systems, such as money, laws, slashdot . . .
Thanks for that link. I love this subject.
After reading the website, I went to wikipedia and checked the relevant entry. The 'rational arguments' section contains a decent condensed version of that website. Meanwhile, I fleshed out the section on 'empirical arguments', perhaps it will amuse you.
Yes, and hot air is amazingly easy to produce in commercial quantities. For example, you could post an article titled "Ask Slashdot: Should I upgrade my Sony laptop to Windows Vista?". Or just set up a wide collector over any major city during the first week of November during an election year.
Bingo. In a typical apartment complex with 16 units per building, all fire risks are multiplied 16x, because a single tenant can burn down all 16 tenants' apartments. So anything that significantly lowers the fire risk gives a bigger payoff.
Actually the problem with fusion power is that the containment vessel gets irradiated. Hard radiation causes practically any material to degrade, weaken, or otherwise become brittle. That means the containment vessel must be periodically replaced. Used containment vessels are radioactive waste that is roughly comparable to the wastes produced by fission.
You see the address ranges a lot when you're poking around in a crashed process with windebug. It's incredibly useful to know approximately where an instruction pointer is pointing.
Guess you had to be there. :)
Für die Kinder, Kamerad!
Nice to see them taking steps like this.
Alas, it's going to cause me some personal heartache. Presently, I know by heart the memory address ranges of the various core Windows components.
Interesting. And maybe that's the right way to look at it. People who are smarter than I am, are working on an improved copyright ideology in which it is the experience, rather than the data, that is protected.
In this new ideology, everyone can freely transfer any files to anyone else; information wants to be free, after all. So share your movies with everyone... in the long run, that's what the studios want anyway. You only have to purchase a ticket when it comes time to actually experience the show.
There would presumably be some kind of trusted players which would bill you two cents each time you played a song. Yes, I know that that's an infuriating idea, but what's the alternative? Charging you to own the bytes (as we do today) is equally troublesome, and worse, does not accurately charge you for the actual amount of pleasure you get.
In Bill Gates' mind, then, everyone can download the Windows install disks. WGA comes along later to impose a fee (or whatever) only on the 'experience' of running Windows.
In my mind, I'd rather pay twenty-five cents for each Word document I edit, than to pay $400 for an installation of the software that I might only use twenty-five times. What I really need is pricing granularity, which today's "purchase the file" schemes fail to accomplish. Same for songs, movies, anything. WGA is objectionable and flawed, but at least it is a more granular purchase scheme than charging per distribution disc.